Nicholas Royle - Regicide

I was smoking and reading Un Régicide in bed when the front door rattled in its frame. With a clear view of the door from my bed, I looked up and put my book down beside me. When the door opened I wasn’t altogether surprised to see the girl from the car. Her black hair framed a face that was Siouxsie’s, except that it wasn’t. Because it was Annie Risk’s. But it wasn’t hers either: the hair was too low over the forehead. She was like a composite of both of them. The only two women in my life, both very much on its fringes, synthesized into this one girl.

She walked in and turned past the bedroom doorway to enter the living room. I followed her. She went over to my stereo and slipped a single from inside her denim jacket onto the turntable. She stood back and I came forward to see what she’d brought. A white label disc was spinning at 45 rpm and the needle cut into it. I looked up but the girl had gone. I whirled around and ran to the door but it was shut and there was no sound in the stairwell. I bent over the record player again and saw that as the needle travelled around the groove towards the centre it left a fine spiral of raspberry-coloured liquid in its wake.

I woke up. My cigarette had burnt a hole in the duvet cover. I smothered it quickly with a pillow, but there was no need: the cigarette was cold. I felt sick and shivered. Brushing the curtain behind my head to one side I looked down into the street for a Mini, but there was only my Escort and one or two other familiar cars.

I checked the front door — undisturbed — and the stereo. There was no record on the turntable and no blood anywhere — naturally — but the power was on. I never left the power on. I flicked the switch and went to use the bathroom. I decided my subconscious had known I’d left the power on and so I’d dreamt about it.

I went back to bed but couldn’t get back to sleep, so I got up and pulled on a pair of boxer shorts and went through to the living room. A cigarette and the Siouxsie video. It was a combination that never failed to engender pleasure, but if I’d wanted to become either completely relaxed or tired enough to go back to sleep I would have been disappointed. My body was exhausted but my brain was active. At dawn I was thinking of taking the car for a run down to the crescent where I’d lost the girl in her Mini when I finally fell asleep in front of the TV.

Driving to the shop a couple of hours later I felt like a jigsaw puzzle that had been put together wrongly. Someone had tried to force pieces into each other and they held, but only just. I had a craving for fresh orange juice but made do with a cigarette instead. I pushed in the dashboard lighter and waited for it to pop out. I withdrew it and brought it up to my mouth. While driving I looked down to align the end of the cigarette with the lighter and my eye was drawn to the burning orange element. I lost my grip on the steering wheel and went the wrong way around a set of bollards. Instantly nauseated, I righted the car and coasted to the kerb. I got out, threw the cigarette in the gutter and leaned against the bonnet for a few moments. The shop would have to open late for once.

I kept seeing the needle cutting into the record and drawing blood. I climbed into the car and got back on the road. Every Mini turned my head. I’d never noticed them before but now it seemed like the city streets were full of them. I couldn’t remember what colour the Siouxsie/Annie girl had been driving. It had, after all, been dark.

I imagined, during the hours of daylight, it parked up in one of the streets on my map. Only by night did she venture into the light of the real world.

I struggled to concentrate on the business of running the shop. The jigsaw feeling had faded but I still wasn’t on top form. I chainsmoked and played randomly selected singles back to back all morning. Customers brought me boxes of records and I bought them all with the briefest examinations and without haggling. The shop was infested with Siouxsie clones but they were all years out of date, painted dolls and scarecrows, their faces plastered with the Halloween make-up Siouxsie herself now did without. Over the years, as the masks had been slowly stripped away she had become more and more beautiful to the point where her beauty was now a provocation, like the music had always been.

I slipped Superstition into the CD player and pressed repeat.

In a stream of people offering me their old picture discs and limited edition gatefold sleeves a girl’s hand pushed a white label single onto the counter. I gave a small cry and immediately looked up but the floor was crowded with customers. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the door close, but it could have been anybody. Nevertheless, I squeezed under the counter and pushed through the crowd to the door. I craned my neck and looked in all directions but she had disappeared. There was no sign of a Mini parked nearby. Heart pounding, I re-entered the shop.

Word must have got around that I was throwing money away today: it seemed as if the whole teenage population of the city had descended on the shop. ‘Whose is this?’ I asked, holding up the white label. No one claimed it. ‘Is it yours?’ I asked the next girl in the queue. She nodded. Someone behind her cackled like a hyena and I felt foolish, but for all I knew it could really have been hers and she’d been too shy to stick her hand up. The colour of the label could have prompted me to imagine someone who hadn’t been there at all. I took the other stuff the girl clearly hadn’t been expecting to sell, then lit a cigarette and put the white label underneath a stack of CDs to look at later.

It was with relief that I locked the door and flipped the open/closed sign. I didn’t need this. I stood and watched the rain through the glass as I lit a cigarette and put the lighter away in my jacket pocket. Cars squealed softly as they braked for the red light. I smoked nervously, unhappy about acknowledging my fear of the unknown girl and the white label. In the brightness of the afternoon it had been easier to rationalise. I watched car headlamps dazzle and melt into wet reflections like silver waterfalls. Taking a deep drag that caused my head to spin I turned away from the window and went back to the counter. I felt like a bug in a killing jar. They could be watching me through the windows from across the street. They would want to see how I reacted when I listened to the white label.

I slipped it out of its blank sleeve, holding it by the edges and angling it so that the light fell across it. There was nothing written on the label, but on the runout groove I made out the inscription ‘It’s a gas’. It meant nothing to me. Just some cutting engineer’s throwaway remark.

I placed the record on the turntable with care and positioned the needle before pressing release. It landed with that satisfying clunk I had heard a million times. It doesn’t matter how new a vinyl record is, you always hear something apart from what you’re meant to hear, even if it’s only the hiss of dust. I wondered what I would actually hear, as the needle wound its way towards the music.

But none came. I checked the amp controls. Everything was on and the volume was turned up. I looked at the needle. It was a third of the way into the record and still there was no sound.

I turned the volume higher and listened more intently. There was the usual rumble of ticks and bumps you get at the beginning and end of records. When it finished I repositioned the needle and played it again. With the volume full up I fancied I could hear the needle itself scoring the groove a fraction deeper. I found myself becoming drawn to the sound. Without the distraction of music it was somehow purer, more elemental. I played the flip side and it was the same. The more I played it and the harder I listened, the more it sank into me. I noticed also that my forehead had begun to hurt where the skin stretched tightly across it. A sharp irritating pain like a paper cut.